The authors of Fundamentals for Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur: From Business Idea to Launch and Management introduce their book, which illuminates entrepreneurial mindsets, motivation, attitudes, and leadership, and covers the entire process of starting a company, from idea through your first four years of operations.

This chapter is from the book

1.0 Introduction

Pick up any newspaper or business publication anywhere in the world today, such as the Financial Times, New York Times, Singapore’s Straits Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, or the Economist, and you are likely to find an article in which a politician or an economist is stating how important entrepreneurship is to the nation and that we need more entrepreneurs to ensure economic growth and prosperity. In these same publications you will also find other stories about entrepreneurs themselves. Most of us will ignore the economist’s or politician’s pontifications and focus our attention on those compelling stories about the valiant entrepreneurs and their uphill battles to create successful ventures. We also sometimes enjoy the stories of the great failures as well. These are also the stories that frequently are seen as documentaries on TV and even award-winning movies (e.g., The Social Network in 2010 about Facebook or Jobs in 2013 about the founder of Apple). As the Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, Missouri recently has stated:

We have a myth in our heads of what the prototypical startup founder is, and that myth is an early- to mid-20s white male who studied computer science at an elite school and dropped out.